How Your Thumbs Critically Affect Your Technique
Why You Shouldn’t Squeeze Your Thumb
- How excessive pinching of the left thumb tightens the entire hand.
- How softening the thumb also loosens the other fingers.
- How to use gravity and the weight of the arm to sink into the fingerboard.
- How holding the left thumb in the air can tighten the hand.
- A soft, not rigid thumb, touching the back of the cello neck.
- Release/unflex the muscles of the upper arm and shoulder in order to feel gravity and the weight of the arm.
- Replace pinching the thumb with hanging arm weight on the playing finger. Round the finger as a hook that you can hang your arm (weight) on.
- As you go from finger to finger, feel gravity and turn your arm weight from one finger (hanging hook) to the next.
- Visualizing the fingerboard as a soft, black pillow which one can sink into, helps you feel gravity and negate the need to pinch up with the thumb.
- Young beginners with small hands and weak fingers often establish a bad squeezing habit that continues through the years.
- Over-squeezing the thumb not only tightens the thumb, but the whole hand.
- Tight, stiff fingers block sensitivity, agility, virtuosity and give you less ability to vary your vibrato.
- Holding your left elbow too high tightens your shoulders, upper arm, and prevents the release of gravity and arm weight.
- Dropping your arm too low in an exaggerated effort to feel arm weight puts the arm into an unbalanced playing position.
- Imagine the fingerboard as a soft, black pillow. This mental imagery helps create the sensation of sinking in, rather than pressing down and/or squeezing up.
- Holding the thumb away from the neck to prevent pinching does not usually loosen the thumb – it can destabilize the hand and actually stiffen it.
About
Paul Katz
Paul Katz is known for his 26-year career as cellist of the internationally acclaimed Cleveland Quartet; as a world-renown teacher…
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"
I am so opposed to the set hand... it is the greatest enemy of freedom... What we want... is a feeling of release, of letting the fingers go. Most sour intonation... comes because they attempt to keep as many fingers as possible down.
" -William Pleeth
